FailCar’s Christmas ramblings

We interrupt the planned screening of tonight’s Old Gold Top Gear to bring you the annual FailCar Christmas message. It’s as traditional as the Queen’s speech and roast turkey and is best enjoyed with a healthy dollop of bah humbug. Over to you, Father FailCar.

As you may well know from my previous blogs I really do love Christmas, it’s my favourite time of the year. Honest.

The thing is, people have already started to send out invitations for various Christmas parties and when I end up going to these I always have a challenge on my hands. On the most part I’m told that I have to ‘behave’ and ‘don’t get me in trouble with any of my work colleagues’. Well, with most of the fun taken out of the equation, I now have a challenge on my hands.

This is something that can take hours at a social gathering and that is I have to talk about something that won’t get me in trouble and that I can waffle on for hours about. Cars, of course.

The greatest thing about having a petrolhead conversation at a party is that if someone tries to cut in with some inane chit chat about driving a diesel Mercedes (not interested unless W123) they immediately get ‘out petrolheadded’. Realising they’re out of their depth for such geekery and, after hearing the conversation move onto ‘was the Escort Cosworth better with the big turbo or the small one’, they eventually disappear back into the crowd.

At a party last year, in-between conversations about where people are going on holiday and stuff about children etc, I managed to find out something useful. One of the guys attending the party was into his cars and after a short amount of time I discovered he was the owner of a brown Allegro which had been ‘modified’ with full rally inspired livery.

Obviously being another petrolhead way out of his depth trying to discuss the merits of James Martin vs Worrall-Thompson branded blenders, he called his son and got him to email over some photos of the aforementioned Allegro. We then spent hours talking about our love of (slightly sh*t) cars.

The problem I want to address is the time between arriving at a party and managing to find someone that you can waffle on about cars with for a while. As a result I propose that this festive season we all wear something to let other petrolheads know of our presence.

I’m not talking about a Steve McQueen Gulf leather jacket either, only he could pull that off. You’ll look like a berk.

I also think slapping a PetrolBlog sticker on your forehead might be a bit on the overkill side of things so we all have to come together and think of something that we can utilise as a badge of honour. Maybe @MajorGav should get to designing a PetrolBlog pin?

Last year at the end of a party I got to speaking to someone just as they had to leave. It transpired their daily driver was a Porsche Speedster and that his ‘weekend’ car was an imported V8 Ford Model B oval track racer in original spec from the early days of booze running in the US. He then left me with nothing to talk about to the remaining revellers other than my encyclopaedic knowledge of Sickipedia jokes.

This will not and cannot happen again.*

I propose that we use this comments section to come up with a suitable wearable item that we can all adorn in the upcoming festive season.

*Specifically that last scenario won’t happen again as I don’t think I’ll be invited back this year.

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PetrolBlog’s very own Stig. Only a select few people know the true identity of FailCar, but his forthright and strong views on automotive matters have won him fans the world over. Like MajorGav, FailCar has a love of 80s cars and has spent the best part of 2011 painstakingly restoring a Peugeot 205 GTi using nothing more than a toothbrush, a lint-free cloth and some Creeping Crack Cure.
Some say he lives in an ark-shaped barn in the middle of the country, surrounded by two of every single car made during the 1980s. All we know is, he’s called FailCar.